Photo: Fred Jagueneau/Bravo
In an episode filled with nods to competitive sports, the most striking competition of all is the race for gold in the season’s Shittiness Olympics. Kizzi and Joe, the favorite contenders, delivered and came out on top. Seeing that V was struggling both physically — being sick — and emotionally — being so close to the anniversary of Bon’s death — Sandy gives her a charter off and sends her to recuperate at a hotel, knowing that V would never ask for the time off herself. It’s a kind gesture that is spurred, in part, by Nathan, who notices that V is not getting better and alerts the captain. The minute V is off the boat, Joe starts messing around. In a confessional right before she leaves, V says, painfully: “Don’t change anything, I’ll be right back.”
Screwing around on a woman when she is sick and grieving is so mean-spirited, like kicking a dog or knocking an ice-cream cone off a kid’s hand or something. Kizzi and Joe’s flirtations begin when V is still onboard but scarce; after Kizzi tells David that she can’t jeopardize her job by hooking up with him — I called it! — she tells Joe, also on the late shift, that she tends to attract needy men. “That’s me,” Joe replies. “You got wifed up, you idiot,” is Kizzi’s comeback. It’s here that they recognize something dark in each other’s eyes. Having seen it, they can’t unsee it, and they spend the rest of the episode acknowledging and reveling in it.
The last day of the charter goes by smoothly. With only three more charters left in the season, the crew has a good rhythm; a momentum that Max, butt-hurt about not being lead deckhand, intends to interrupt. The Bravado has to relocate to a new, narrower marina because of the America’s Cup, so Sandy expects the team to be alert during docking. Despite the chaos with the bow thruster last week, Sandy decides to back into her even smaller spot again. After supervising Max as he hauls the anchor — in one of two amazing language slips this week, Max calls “two a.m.” on the radio rather than “two o’clock”; later, he will ask Cathy: “Are you robbing to plan a bank?” — Nathan tells him that, during docking, Sandy wants him to use his hands to call distances.
As they approach the marina, Max decides to be as difficult as possible. He’s sitting down; Sandy tells him to stand up. She asks him to speak on the radio; he is silent. Nathan reinforces the request and he talks back: “She’s on the bow with me, Nathan, relax.” He starts calling the distances through the radio when Sandy wants him to show her with his hands. The boat is docked with no major disaster, but his high jinks make the whole process “more difficult than it has to be,” per Sandy. It drives Nathan up a wall. Max tries to clear the air with him later, but Nathan is not interested in hearing his half-baked excuses; he moves Max from bow to stern for the rest of the season. It’s a good leadership moment from Nathan: He is authoritative without being rude. Despite being committed to defending him all season, I have to admit that Max is in the wrong. He can’t just do whatever he wants! Yet any irritation he might’ve caused in this viewer is immediately forgiven when, in a confessional, he tells us that his grandfather was in the French Resistance during World War II, which is why he has a problem with authority.
Kizzi and Joe flirt blatantly at the tip meeting, while V, sitting next to them, looks like she’s about to melt into the couch. They get a heartening tip — $1,682 each from a $20,000 total — and their spirits are only raised higher when Sandy tells them they’ll visit the Alinghi Red Bull Racing Headquarters on their day off, which sounds like the title for a video game but is really a training facility. V leaves right after, and Kizzi is in the middle of telling Cathy that she wouldn’t do anything with Joe when V walks in to say good-bye. Cathy tells Kizzi that she’s not “really thinking about” her thing with Max, the hopeless romantic; she’s just vibing.
At dinner, Aesha cries about how much she misses her fiancé, Scott, and talks a little about how yachting might not ultimately be compatible with their plan to start a family. Meanwhile, everyone notices Kizzi and Joe’s flirtation. Nathan, Aesha, and Josh are disappointed by their behavior. After worrying about V, Nathan expresses reasonable concern for the integrity of his deck team: If things fall apart between V and Joe, that would create tension on deck again, this close to the season being over. In the vans back to the Bravado, Nathan tells Joe he can’t hook up with Kizzi. But by the time they’re all in the hot tub, Nathan and Aesha can tell the two of them are past the point of warning.
Kizzi and Joe are the last ones to leave the hot tub, agreeing that they should go to bed before anything worse happens. But they keep drinking and hanging out, apparently getting off on the illicitness of what they’re doing. It’s obviously a kink for both of them. “Victoria doesn’t deserve disrespect,” Joe says after a whole night of disrespecting her. Finally, they head downstairs to their cabins. The editing shows a camera that is perfectly placed to capture them, but — wink, wink! — they move just beyond it into a blind spot. “Don’t kiss me,” Kizzi says. “I can’t lie.” The next thing we hear is kissing sounds. The camera holds on the reflective surfaces of the boat, and we see the tops of their heads very close together: In other words, there is zero doubt that they kissed. Joe tries to move the camera, thinking that it caught them, as soon as he sees it. A disgruntled cameraman runs downstairs, but they’ve already separated when he arrives at the scene of the crime.
Immediately, Kizzi and Joe agree never to speak a word of this to anyone. (Similarly, Max and Cathy decide not to tell the whole boat that they had sex. I don’t like it when they show sex on reality TV because it is none of my business, but it is hilarious that Max says oh la la in bed.) In the morning, when Josh asks Kizzi for the gossip, she insists there isn’t any. Joe decides to take a different route, pretending that he doesn’t remember anything from the night before. I simply don’t believe that to be true. He really didn’t seem that drunk, but it’s one way to sell his regretful act, and an “excuse,” if he needs it, that he wasn’t in full control of his actions. You almost have to applaud his audacity. Kizzi is more honest in her confessionals: “Deny, deny, deny” is her strategy. She reasons that if no one knows about the kiss, no one can tell V, apparently forgetting that the whole thing is on camera. Even if V doesn’t find out right away, she’ll know eventually, and it’s probably worse to have this kind of bomb drop off camera, when there is no incentive to patch things up than when shooting.
In fact, throughout the episode, Kizzi pushes the form of the confessional interview. It’s almost as if she has bought the notion that the confessional is a diary of sorts, a way to process the experience of shooting the show, and that it will remain private — or, at least, between her and the producers. Earlier, she play-acted being a therapist, concluding that she’s “happy living in self-denial.” Now, confessing to the kiss, she almost sounds like she believes anything at all that happens on a reality-television set can remain a secret. The next day, on the way back from the Alinghi headquarters, Joe doubles down on his act. Maintaining that he doesn’t remember, he asks Kizzi what happened the night before. She tells him it was just a peck, not a full-on make-out. In a confessional, she admits that she doesn’t regret kissing Joe — she only feels bad for doing it when she did it, when V is sick and sad. Back on the Bravado, Joe calls his mom to talk about his mistake. She cries with him, tells him V is not even his girlfriend, and, in general, acts like he can do no wrong. Ding, ding, ding! A lot about this guy just started making sense.
But more wholesome things happen at the Alinghi training facility. At the end of their tour, Scott surprises Aesha. Seeing him makes her sob. I have to be honest: I cried, too. Scott set up the visit with Sandy and stayed for the rest of the night, even going out with the crew. Their affection and respect for each other inspire everyone to be a little better. Max wants what they have, though he’s not sure he’ll find it with Cathy. She’s taught him “not to care,” but to be fair, at dinner, she tells him how much she appreciates his effort to make her feel like she’s the only person in the room. Nathan, meanwhile, can only think of Gael: They go out to dinner at a place he went to with her the previous summer. Going back to the Bravado, he tells the boys that he wants to make things work with her after the season. He seems excited about the prospect. Seeing love thrive was the push he needed to do what he needed to do to get his girl.
Nathan will be put to the test sooner than he thinks. While the crew is out at the flamenco place — a source of inspiration for our unproblematic fave, Josh — Sandy is coordinating a sub for V for the next charter. Even before Sandy tells Nathan the next day, we know that it’ll be Gael. Nathan can’t quite believe his luck, for good or bad. He literally laughs to himself in disbelief, officially checking out of the Joe-and-Kizzi disaster to worry about himself. Joe, for his part, is not as thrilled; he and Gael butted heads last season. Besides, he’s feeling worse and worse as V texts him things like “I miss you” and reaches out to Kizzi to ask how things on the boat are going. In Kizzi’s cabin, they both insist they feel bad with a smile on their faces. When Joe says that he’s going to tell V about their kiss and Kizzi screeches a curse, it makes him laugh. It’s all a joke to him! You can’t convince me otherwise. It would be legendary if V now took it upon herself to sabotage him for the rest of the season, John Tucker style. Unfortunately, not everyone can be as levelheaded as Aesha and Scott, so here we are, stuck with high-school-level romantic drama in the middle of the Mediterranean.
